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The Ghost of Democratic Agenda

The Ghost of Democratic Agenda

Echoes of another liberal turning point were felt at last week's Thinking Big conference.

by

Harold Meyerson

After surviving one of the worst presidencies in American history,
liberals -- both emboldened and frustrated by the new Democratic
president -- came to Washington for a conference where they laid out
their visions and formulated strategies to push the new president in a
more liberal direction.

I'm not talking about this week's Thinking Big, Thinking Forward conference at the Capital Hilton, which was sponsored by the Prospect,
Demos, the Institute for America's Future and the Economic Policy
Institute. I'm referring to the Democratic Agenda conference held two
blocks away at the Mayflower Hotel in 1977, the first year of Jimmy
Carter's presidency. Richard Nixon had been banished to San Clemente, a
huge Democratic majority controlled Congress, and hopes were high that
two long-sought liberal goals -- national health insurance and a
government guarantee of full employment -- could soon be enacted. But
doubts about Carter's economic policies were rising, too. His economic
team had begun work on the deregulation of trucking and airlines, and
his commitment to national health insurance and full employment were in
question as well.

So liberals -- about 2,000 of them -- came to the Mayflower. They
heard a keynote address from Michael Harrington, a top liberal
strategist and leader of a democratic socialist organization that
worked openly within the Democratic Party. A brilliant and spellbinding
speaker, Harrington made a strategic case for planned full employment.
He argued that it would ease the path for environmental legislation,
render racial tensions less acute, and make generous foreign aid a
political possibility.

In fact, the conference was a landmark in American liberalism
chiefly because of the strategic reconciliations it signified. The
conference marked a coming together of leaders of the left movements
that had emerged in the 1930s -- that is, the progressive unions --
with the leaders of the left movements that had emerged in the '60s --
feminist, civil rights, and environmental.

Democratic Agenda was funded chiefly by the three unions: the United
Auto Workers (UAW), the Machinists, and the American Federation of
State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME). Each had more than a
million members, and were deeply at odds with the Cold War politics and
ongoing hostility to newer social movements that characterized George
Meany's AFL-CIO. There were sizable delegations from the three unions,
and their presidents - the UAW's Doug Fraser, the Machinists' William
Winpisinger, and AFSCME's Jerry Wurf - all spoke. They also met, I
believe for the first time, such 1960s movement leaders as Gloria
Steinem, Tom Hayden and Ron Dellums. At the Mayflower, the rifts
between the '30s and '60s left movements began to be interred, and a
political perspective shared by both began to emerge.

The comparisons between Democratic Agenda and Thinking Big are
instructive. Each sounded themes of liberal rebirth; speakers at both
conferences combined long-range visions with legislative specifics;
both conferences issued a call to arms. But the Democratic Agenda
conference, unbeknown to its participants, came at the end of the New
Deal era. Reaganism was already abroad in the land, and Carter's
deregulatory initiatives were a taste of the laissez-faire policies to
come. The full employment bill sponsored by Hubert Humphrey in the
Senate and Augustus Hawkins in the House was never enacted. (Full
employment legislation was a key demand of American liberals at two
points after World War II: First, immediately following the war, when
liberals feared a return of the Depression, and then in the mid-1970s,
as the broadly shared prosperity of the postwar decades began to wane.)
Despite the huge Democratic congressional majorities, national health
insurance wasn't established, either. Worse yet, Carter's appointee to
head the Federal Reserve, Paul Volcker, took arms against inflation by
tightening credit and, as Jeff Madrick noted at Thinking Big, raising
the dollar so high that cheaper foreign imports began to swamp the
American marketplace. The transformation of the industrial Midwest into
America's Rust Belt began during, and was partly caused by, the Carter
presidency.

Over the next two years, groups convened by Democratic Agenda
organized opposition to Carter's rightward drift on economics. At the
Democratic Midterm Convention in Memphis in December of 1978, 40
percent of the delegates opposed resolutions supporting Carter's
economic policies. (In response, the Democratic National Committee
promptly abolished midterm conventions -- there had been two, in 1974
and 1978.) At Democratic Agenda's rally at that convention, Ted Kennedy
broke with Carter over national health care in a memorable speech that
had delegates shouting their support for Kennedy's stance. Shortly
thereafter, Kennedy embarked on his primary challenge to Carter.

In its attitude towards the new Democratic president, Thinking Big
was as different from Democratic Agenda as Barack Obama is from Jimmy
Carter, or as the end of the Reagan Age is from its beginning. At this
moment, liberal hope looks to be more grounded than it was in 1977. Not
only is Obama himself a liberal, which Carter was not, but the urgency
of the economic situation is expanding what Harrington called "the
limits of the possible" in restructuring the American economy. On one
hand, the triumph of radical capitalism over the past three decades
means that many of the public policies that progressives envisioned in
the mid-1970s, such as a universal governmental health system, are
barely spoken of today. That Democrats have to deal with the Blue Dogs
in their ranks attests to the power that the Reaganite narrative still
wields. On the other hand, the unification of the various parts of the
liberal family -- something that Democratic Agenda tried to hasten --
has largely been achieved, and the current economic meltdown has
solidified it even further.

Still, as we were reminded by conference organizer and Prospect co-founder Robert Kuttner, Obama's economic advisers are nowhere near as radical as the times demand.
(Ironically, the most progressive heavyweight on Obama's economic team
may well be Paul Volcker.) But it is early yet. Obama has been
president for just over three weeks, and the tone that Thinking Big
took toward the president ranged from critical support to, well, just
plain support. The doubts that liberals entertain about Obama aren't
about the fundamental direction of his presidency, but whether he is
moving the nation leftward as far and as fast as it needs to be moved.
The doubts liberals entertained about Carter were that he was actually
moving the nation rightward.

Thinking Big convened at a more urgent moment in the nation's
history than Democratic Agenda did. But in 1977, Harrington conveyed an
urgency about the course the nation had charted. He understood that
unless liberalism won new victories -- creating universal health care
and a greater level of economic security -- that racial divisions and
an unchecked capitalism would destroy not just the Democrats'
decades-old political majority but also the mixed economy and the
broadly shared prosperity that that majority had created.

"We have to go as far beyond Roosevelt as Roosevelt went beyond
Hoover," Harrington said at Democratic Agenda, "or we're going back to
Hoover." Thirty-two years later, that looks like pretty fair prophecy.

Further

Surrounded by a massive police presence, the country's top law enforcement official told a group of carefully screened students at Georgetown's Law School that, "In this great land, the government does not tell you what to think or what to say." In his speech, only announced the day before, Sessions went on to denounce uppity knee-taking football players and defend his boss' call, hours before, for them to be fired. We may need to upgrade the ole Irony Alert buzzer. It can't keep up.